TLDR: school have cut lunchbreak from 50 mins to 20 mins and added on an extra 90 mins revision study per day.
DD is in year 11 and school have informed us that children must attend mandatory revision sessions for a six week period leading up to a set of mock exams in November.
For six weeks, they're getting lunchbreak reduced from 50 mins to 20 mins so they can attend a 30 min revision session, then there's a 60 min session after school. We've been told these are compulsory and we can only request permission to miss them if we have a valid reason like a GP or dentist appointment.
This isn't working for us because:
- 20 mins isn't enough time to go to the toilet, retrieve lunch from locker, take it to the canteen, eat food, return to locker with lunchbox and collect revision books.
- She misses the direct bus home after school (we live in a rural village). By the time she gets out at 4.30pm, she's battling with commuters to get on overcrowded buses and has to travel to another town to change buses. She doesn't get home until around 6pm now. I can't pick her up from school as I work full time.
- She's still getting approx 90-120 mins homework from regular lessons. She's getting in after 6pm, eating an evening meal, doing her homework and going to bed. She has no free time to herself.
- The revision lessons are different to her timetabled lessons, so some days she's carrying books and folders for seven different lessons which makes her bag very heavy.
It's come to a head today as her period came unexpectedly this morning and she didn't have anything with her as she's not due till next week. She spent her 20 mins lunchbreak hunting down the member of staff who looks after filling up the san pro baskets in the toilets as they were all empty. She was exhausted, hungry and PMT'y and broke down in an afternoon lesson, so they rang me and asked me to collect her.
I've talked to her tonight and she says the work load is far too much and she can't cope with it.
School are repeating this six week revision programme again in Jan/Feb with another set of mocks after half term. They have said there will be more revision lessons after Easter in the run up to the actual exams but we don't know the format of this yet.
AIBU to think the workload is far too much?